...The Internet has made it possible for anyone to have a web site and to rant and speculate to their heart’s content. There are a large number of 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Many on both sides of the issue are equally ignorant. Neither side has any shame about demonstrating ignorance.

Both sides of the issue have conspiracy theories. 9/11 was a conspiracy whether a person believes that it was an inside job or that a handful of Arabs outwitted the entire intelligence apparatus of the Western world and the operational response of NORAD and the US Air Force.

For one side to call the other conspiracy theorists is the pot calling the kettle black.

The question turns not on name-calling but on evidence.

The 9/11 Truth movement was not created by bloggers ranting on their web sites. It was created by professional architects and engineers some of whom are known for having designed steel high rise buildings. It was created by distinguished scientists, such as University of Copenhagen nano-Chemist Niels Harrit who has 60 scientific papers to his credit and physicist Steven Jones. It was created by US Air Force pilots and commercial airline pilots who are expert at flying airplanes. It was created by firefighters who were in the twin towers and who personally heard and experienced numerous explosions including explosions in the sub-basements. It was created by members of 9/11 families who desire to know how such an improbable event as 9/11 could possibly occur.

The professionals and the scientists are speaking from the basis of years of experience and expert knowledge. Moreover, the scientists are speaking from the basis of careful research into the evidence that exists. When an international research team of scientists spends 18 months studying the components in the dust from the towers and the fused pieces of concrete and steel, they know what they are doing. When they announce that they have definite evidence of incendiaries and explosives, you can bet your life that that have the evidence.

When a physicist proves that Building 7 (the stories not obscured by other buildings) fell at free fall speed and NIST has to acknowledge that he is correct, you can bet your life that the physicist is correct.

When fire department captains and clean-up teams report molten steel – and their testimony is backed up with photographs – in the debris of the ruins weeks and months after the buildings’ destruction, you can bet your life the molten steel was there. When the same authorities report pumping fire suppressants and huge quantities of water with no effect on the molten steel, you can bet your life that the temperature long after the buildings’ destruction remained extremely high, far higher than any building fire can reach.

When the architects, engineers, and scientists speak, they offer no theory of who is responsible for 9/11. They state that the known evidence supports neither the NIST reports nor the 9/11 Commission Report. They say that the explanation that the government has provided is demonstrably wrong and that an investigation is required if we are to discover the truth about the event.

It is not a conspiracy theory to examine the evidence and to state that the evidence does not support the explanation that has been given.

That is the position of the 9/11 Truth movement.

What is the position of the movement’s critics? Ted Rall says: "Everything I’ve read and watched on Truther sites is easily dismissed by anyone with a basic knowledge of physics and architecture. (I spent three years in engineering school.)

Wow! What powerful credentials. Has Rall ever designed a high rise steel building? Could Rall engage in a debate with a professor of nano-chemistry? Could he refute Newton’s laws in a debate with university physicists? Does Rall know anything about maneuvering airplanes? Does he have an explanation why 100 firefighters, janitors, and police report hearing and experiencing explosions that they did not hear or experience?

Clearly, Ted Rall has no qualifications whatsoever to make any judgment about the judgments of experts whose knowledge exceeds his meager understanding by a large amount...

Unlike Rall and Barnhardt, Alex does refer to evidence, but it is second or third-hand hearsay evidence that is nonsensical on its face. For example, Alex writes that Chuck Spinney "tells me that ‘there ARE pictures taken of the 757 plane hitting Pentagon – they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them both – stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows.’"

If there were pictures or videos of an airliner hitting the Pentagon, they would have been released years ago. They would have been supplied to the 9/11 Commission. Why would the government refuse for 10 years to release pictures that prove its case? The FBI confiscated all film from all surveillance cameras. No one has seen them, much less a Pentagon critic such as Spinney.

I have to say that the van driver must have better eyes than an eagle if he could see expressions on passenger faces through those small airliner portholes in a plane traveling around 500 mph. Try it sometimes. Sit on your front steps and try to discern the expressions of automobile passengers through much larger and clearer windows traveling down your street in a vehicle moving 30 mph. Then kick the speed up 16.7 times to 500 mph and report if you see anything but a blur.

Alex’s other evidence that 9/11 truthers are kooks is a letter that Herman Soifer, who claims to be a retired structural engineer, wrote to him summarizing "the collapse of Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly." This is what Soifer, who "had followed the plans and engineering of the Towers during construction" wrote to Alex: "The towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow." This canard was disposed of years ago. If Alex had merely googled the plans of the buildings, he would have discovered that there were no thin-walled hollow tubes, but a very large number of massively thick steel beams...

There is no 9/11 debate. On the one hand there are credentialed experts who demonstrate problems in the official account, and on the other hand there are non-experts who denounce the experts as conspiracy kooks. The experts are cautious and careful about what they say, and their detractors have thrown caution and care to the wind. That is the state of the debate...MORE...LINK -------------------------Ted Rall: Lawsuit tantrums and thin-skinned, socialist, control-freak issues-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

Sadly, at their core, wholly indoctrinated left-wingers have already swallowed an ideological big lie, and like left-liberals and Judeo-Christian Zionists, exist in a delusional realm of fantasy, false consciousness and self-deceit.

Hence, it’s a small leap from the fantastical ideological realm where they subside to a fantastical engineering realm where reinforced steel frame towers symmetrically and uniformly collapse into their own footprints at free-fall speed from being whacked on the side by a jetliner or (as in the case of WTC 7) from scattered fires and a bit of debris.

I guess some people simply can’t face reality, and hence retreat into intellectual sanctuaries where anything and everything is possible.

When enough people retreat into this fantasy world, it becomes a religious or political ideology built in castles in the air that sooner or later crash to earth, as did the Soviet Union.

Contrast this with the solid, lasting, oak-like presence of Greco-Roman-Christian-Saxon civilization, which despite taking a beating from all of these delusional fantasy-dwellers and psychopaths on both the left and right, is still standing…if barely.

Perhaps that’s why lefties insist on believing the 9/11, Big Government engineered Big Lie: they think that if they can simply hold out a little bit longer, totalitarian government can FORCE everyone else subscribe to their own mentally ill fantasies and delusions -- at the point of a gun.

These poor, deluded psychopaths have so much in common with Zionists that they probably both fall into the same category of psychosis.

No wonder they find themselves on common ground vis-à-vis 9/11 truthers, and in so many other pro-authoritarian-government, world view areas.

Remember, the Communist Party recently endorsed liberal fascist, professional political flim-flam man Barack Obama for re-election for a reason -- it's because these self-deceiving, totalitarian psychopaths all think alike.